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Thursday, February 16, 2012

Valentine, oh Valentine

We had an eventful Valentine's Day around here. The day before, I ran around Target like a crazy mama (with many similar-minded crazy mamas), buying boxes of Valentine's for all the boys to hand out. I suppose if I was as good as the other parents in pre-school, I would have made Valentine's cards for my kids to hand out and packaged small, cute, decorated bags full of candy and little toys for everyone to enjoy.

I'm just not that good.

So I bought the boxes of Cars 2 Valentines with magnets, Spiderman Valentines with pencils, and Scooby Doo 3D Valentines, and spent the better part of an hour writing in the name of each kid in each class (2 classes for Luke, 1 for Will and 1 for Matt) on the cards. When that was done, I rolled out sugar cookie dough and cut out big heart cookies to decorate. If you've followed us for a while, you know that this mama likes to decorate sugar cookies! Good thing everyone else likes to eat them.

It was a late night of Valentine's Day preparation.

I got everyone out the door, dressed in red, and bags of Valentines in hand on Tuesday morning... miraculous! Nate and I went out to a special lunch at Nordstrom's Cafe, and were planning to spend the evening with the boys decorating those cookies, having a nice dinner, doing baths... the normal stuff.

But it didn't quite work out that way. I could tell something was wrong with Luke when I picked him up from day care. He was listless. He didn't feel sick. He was just... down. It was odd.

When we got home, Luke perked up and enjoyed some time with Will and Oma while Nate made dinner and I got cookie supplies ready. Finally, the cookie decorating commenced. You'll see that Luke's ability to dump more and more decorating icing on cookies has improved, Will was exceptionally tolerant of the whole process, and Matt is now much more excited about cookies!

OK, so doing cookies before dinner probably seems like a bad idea. In hindsight, it was a bad idea. I probably should have bagged the whole cookie thing when it suddenly occurred to me that Luke had been so listless when I picked him up because he'd had not one, but two Valentine's parties over the course of the day, and was likely coming down off a wicked double dip sugar high.

But hindsight didn't do us any good on Tuesday night. Nope. Not one bit. We finished decorating the cookies, put the supplies away, and set down to a lovely dinner of pasta and Rao's sauce. Luke proceeded to push his bowl away. And this was just the start of a temper tantrum that lasted for more than an hour, and consisted of Luke spewing the following pre-school obscenities at us:

Mommy and Daddy, you are the meanest Mommy and Daddy ever!Mommy and Daddy, you aren't my best friend!

...and the worst one ever...

Mommy and Daddy, you can't come to my party!

I am not exactly sure who Luke thinks actually plan and carry out his birthday party, but I don't think he was actually thinking logically. He just had too much sugar.

He went to bed without a bath, but with a heck of a fight. And within 2 minutes of laying down and giving his teddy bear the choke hold of love, Luke was out like a light.

After everyone was asleep, I proceeded to throw out the remaining Valentine's candy. I know that in a typical day, Luke doesn't consume 1/10th of the sugar he consumed on Tuesday... but I didn't even want to risk a repeat.

About Me

I'm trying to find a balance between holding it all together and throwing it all to the wind. By nature, I am 100% Type A. I lived a very planned and predictable life. But as I became a mother, I've tried hard to let some of that go. Going with the flow always seemed less stressful from the outside looking in! Sometimes I am successful in my goal of embracing the chaos of life with 3 kids, a marriage, special needs, and a full time career. Sometimes :)